The invention generally refers to a method of and apparatus for testing mass-produced articles, and in particular electrically-driven articles which have an appreciable weight and/or volume and which would require a test sequence of appreciable duration. Non-delimiting examples of such articles are household appliances such as washing machines and refrigerators, or (semi)-industrial devices such as lead-acid batteries solar heat-exchange panels or ovens. It is detrimental to the manufacturing process that in such cases a test of all articles would require a physically large buffer storage. Furthermore, the execution of an extended test program for each article would require a large amount of signalling between a test-program controller, the article under test, a sensing means for sensing specific operational conditions of the article and human operators and/or a computer for analyzing the test data and possible processing. This processing may be necessary for two reasons. In the first place, the data of a single article may be processed for determining the acceptability of its performance, such as by averaging of raw data, curve fitting, or by determining weak spots. In the second place, the data from a large number of articles may be used for determination of the correctness of certain process parameters, such as an oven temperature or the composition of a chemical bath. Said signalling to human operators would be very time-consuming. If processing were done on-line with the articles under test it would readily interfere with the throughput in the manufacturing.